Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die

The jury is still out as to whether turkeys can actually drown by looking up at the rain; the differing opinions dredged up by the search engines suggest that while most turkeys are smarter than that, there is a proportion of them that fail this test of basic survival instincts.

Common sense and the clip below lead to the conclusion that while the dumb turkey gene is not found in the wild (all drowned, I’m afraid) it may very well have found a niche in the domestic turkey gene pool. Industrial food farms are fertile mediums for dumb genes to spread, since there is no competitive advantage to being smart in such conditions. The knife does not discriminate on basis of IQ, nor does smart roast turkey taste any different from dumb roast turkey. So why not waterboard themselves to death?

Now, Bob forbid I should try to draw parallels between human society and industrial food farms, but the dumb turkey syndrome is not limited to the fowl population. Indeed, as the shitrain begins to drizzle on humankind, one will find a certain number of them craning their necks and staring up to the sky, much like the drowned turkeys. Maybe even looking for the same thing… who knows? Do turkeys also expect space aliens to suddenly appear and make everything nice? Are they aware that deus ex machina is but a narrative sleigh of hand used by lazy playwrights of yore to beguile the yokels?

I’m in no position to speculate as to whether space aliens exist or not –it’s a big universe– or whether they are here already. Nor can I speculate as to what kind of aliens these may be or what their agenda is. If pressed, I quote Calvin and Hobbes:

There are growing numbers of people who are going with the “alien savior” narrative that an interstellar “transition team” is hanging out in a nearby dimension just waiting to help us through the upcoming shift. These are various alien lifeforms joined in a confederation that for some yet unexplained reason consider what happens on this planet of cosmic importance. When the time comes, they will come down upon us and fix the environment and poverty and disease and energy and Justin Beiber in one fell swoop.

It’s a nice idea, but one that suffers from some serious drawbacks, assuming such aliens even exist. To begin, it predisposes the believers to think that anything that comes from the sky are “beings of the light”, when there is no objective reason to assume this will be the case. And I’m not even talking a Mars Attacks scenario, but a much more terrenal “wag the alien” psy-ops operation using real human-made technology that we’ve never been privy to before. Either way, it’s a potentially dangerous belief for doves and turkeys alike.

But what really burns my assets about the alien savior narrative is that it is promotes pernicious slave memes that reinforce our constant need for someone else to tell us what to do, while at the same time sapping the drive to take any sort of initiative because, hey, you know, the lil’ green guys have it all figured out. That’s just substitution of the current authority figures (the gummint and the copro-rations) for alien authority figures, and has nothing to do with our evolution as a species. And I doubt any real alien of the light would have much use for humans still bound in the servitude mindset, seeing as they don’t seem to have had much use for us so far.

In the end, it all boils down to the same conclusion: we broke it, we fix it. No more waiting for orders from above, waiting for someone else to get the job done. There is no shortcut to Heaven, and no-one is going to help us but I and I. And if we can’t manage that, it don’t matter if there are aliens or leprechauns or tooth fairies, because we will still be slaves. Do not be fooled by alien contacts that come under the aegis of the system, because only when we truly stand free as humans will our real galactic family come a-knockin’ to welcome us to the neighborhood. Until then, we are trapped in a pen drowning in the shitrain to the sound of a sharpening knife. And the aliens will be landing next Thanksgiving. Have a nice gobble!